Diabetes Apps Lacking Privacy Policies

If you use a smartphone app to manage your diabetes, you might want to check whether it protects your privacy. In analyzing 211 Android diabetes apps, researchers found that a whopping 81 percent didn’t spell out any privacy policies. And simply having such a policy doesn’t mean that the app will keep your data private: Most of the 41 apps with available privacy policies collected users’ data—such as insulin doses, blood glucose levels, and even your GPS locations—and half shared the information with third parties, such as advertisers. Only four policies said the company would ask users for permission before sharing the information. Source:The Journal of the American Medical Association, published online March 8, 2016